Through a Netherlandish Looking-Glass: Philips van Winghe and Jean l’Heureux in the Catacombs

This chapter focuses on the investigation of the Roman catacombs by two Early Modern scholars from the Netherlands - Philips van Winghe and Jean L’Heureux [Macarius]. Examining Van Winghe drawings and notes as well as Macarius’s treatise on early Christian Iconography (Hagioglypta), it discusses why these two foreigners in Rome exhibited a sensitivity to the style of the art of the catacombs absent in their Italian contemporaries, who appreciated catacomb art only for its value as historical evidence or holy relic. It proposes that it was Van Winghe and Macarius’s northern origins, experience living in a denominationally heterogeneous (Catholic-Protestant) region, and ‘outside’ status in the caput mundi that made them less committed to the confessional polemics of the Counter-Reformation and more open to an artistic style that deviated from the classical norms of the Italian Renaissance.